James Staten's Blog

Pop quiz: How many of your company’s top business leaders do you talk to on a daily basis? How many know your name? And finally, how many of them do you engage to brainstorm on how to leverage the latest technologies to drive up revenues and profits?

If that was an uncomfortable test, it's time to wake up to the changing realities in today’s corporate world. If you aren’t having these types of conversations and instead your day is filled with managing the systems of record in your company, you may be on a path to corporate irrelevancy.

For the past year Forrester has been talking ad nauseam about the Empowered employee and their self-directed embrace of technology. As Forrester’s esteemed analysts on our Application Development & Delivery team have so clearly pointed out, it is these empowered employees who are creating the new systems of engagement our companies are using to reach new customers, define new workflows, and generate new revenues. And these new systems they are building are pulling away from the old systems of record – the ones you are in charge of maintaining.

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You know there are developers in your company using public cloud platforms, but do you really know what they are doing? You suspect it’s just test and development work, but are you sure? And if it is production workloads are they taking the steps necessary to protect the company? We have the answers to these questions and you may be surprised by how far they are going.

It’s tough being an infrastructure & operations professional these days. According to our ForrSight surveys, for every cloud project you know about there could be 3 to 6 others you don’t know about. Business unit leaders, marketing and sales professionals and Empowered developers are leading the charge. They aren’t circumventing I&O as a sign of rebellion – they simply are trying to move quickly to drive revenue and increase productivity. While every I&O professional should be concerned about this pattern of shadow IT and its implications on the role of I&O in the future, the more immediate concern is about whether these shadow efforts are putting the company at risk.

The bottom line: Cloud use isn’t just test and development. In fact, according to our ForrSight research there’s more production use of IaaS cloud platforms than test and development and broader use is coming (see Figure 1 below). The prominent uses are for training, product demonstration and other marketing purposes. Our research also shows that test and development projects in the cloud are just as likely to go to production in the cloud as they are to come back to your data center.

After three days of cloudwashing, cloud-in-a-box and erector set private cloud musings at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week, CEO Larry Ellison chose day four to take the wraps off a legitimate move into cloud computing.

Oracle Public Cloud is the unification of the company's long-struggling software-as-a-service (SaaS) portfolio with its Fusion applications transformation, all atop Oracle VM and Sun hardware. While Ellison spent much of his keynote taking pot shots at his former sales executive and now SaaS nemesis, Salesforce CEO Mark Benioff, the actual solution being delivered is more of a direct competitor to Amazon Web Services than Force.com. The strongest evidence is in Oracle's stance on multitenancy. Ellison adamantly shunned a tenancy model built on shared data stores and application models, which are key to the profitability of Salesforce.com (and most true SaaS and PaaS solutions), stating that security comes only through application and database isolation and tenancy through the hypervisor. Oracle will no doubt use its own Xen-based hypervisor, OracleVM rather than the enterprise standard VMware vSphere, but converting images between these platforms is quickly proving trivial.

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In the IaaS market the open source torch has officially been passed from Eucalyptus to OpenStack, a community effort that is showing strong momentum in both vendor participation and end user interest. But now it needs to start showing staying power, and that's just what I expect to see at this week's OpenStack Design Summit in Boston. What started as an effort to leverage the open community to help advance the technologies started by Rackspace and NASA has now turned into a vibrant community advancing IaaS technologies at a rapid pace. What it was lacking up until this summer was solid go-to-market momentum. But now: